designing my life and bloggin' about it

I’m working from home a lot these days so I figured its time to move things around and redesign my home office. Right before my twins were born I moved my office upstairs to the loft. I didn’t really think to much of the setup… my concern was converting the old office into a nursery for my girls. The most thought I put into it was the positioning of my desk.

After a while I started moving more things to the loft like my old sofa, some Ikea storage units and my DJ set. Having those things in the loft/office gave me some ideas on what I wanted to do with the space. Now I have bigger plans for the loft. My vision is to basically convert it to the ideal work get away. My ideal programming environment. Even though it’ll be devoted to work I don’t want it to resemble the usual corporate office. Traditional corporate offices really suck for programmers. My day job would never ever create an ideal environment for programmers so my home office will be my Google or better yet my FogCreek get away.

The pictures your seeing in this post were taken at random times after the move into the loft. I’m working on the redesign now so you won’t see any new pictures until I’m done. The initial idea is to take the fun side of Google’s office ideas and merge them with the efficient ideas of FogCreek. I’ll be the only person working in this space so there are a number of things I can leave out.

I have a bookcase that I’ll keep as my library but the cd & dvd towers gots to go. I’ll box up my collection until I can layout a plan to rip them to my hard drives. Most of the books and magazines in my bookcase are outdated so I should probably get rid of them. As a web developer I’ve been programming all kinds of different languages. Time to let some of them go. For example I have five Perl programming books. I can honestly say I’ll never code Perl again (thank god). It was fun while it lasted but time to move on.

If I can get rid of enough books I might get a bookcase that’s half the size. The way things are going I probably won’t buy many physical books anymore. I’ll just need a nice docking station for my iPad, Kindle or Nook.

Speaking of gadgets, I got rid of the dual 19″ monitor setup and got one 24″ Dell HD capable monitor. I gave away one of the old monitors but I still have the other. Depending on the layout I might still use the two monitors. Maybe I can set it up FogCreek style… minus the adjustable desk. The added advantage with the 24″ is the dual connections. I have my Mac Pro hooked up via DVI and my XBox 360 via VGA.

I was lucky enough to snatch up a Herman Miller Aeron chair back in 2002 during an office auction (a company I use to work for). It’s an earlier version of the popular chair but it works just fine. Between the monitor, xbox, dj set and other little gadgets my desk is pretty much planned out. Just need to get better cable management.

As for the rest of the loft/office I plan on making it the ultimate coder lounge. I got my sofa which I’ll probably mostly use for laptop sessions, book reading or just relaxing. On each side of the sofa I have some experiments setup. It’s pretty well lit during the day. There’s plenty of natural light flowing into the loft from the two skylights and a double window on the oposite side of the loft (away from desk). I’ll invest in some nice lamps for late night coding sessions or when I’m just collecting achievement points on XBoxLive. I thought about getting some bean bags for the remaining space but I wanted to keep it clear since at some point I’ll probably have the kids up there hanging out with daddy. I also have my bike stored here.

So that’s it! I’m already close to getting this all done. I’ll post a follow up to this post as soon as I have some pics… I might even submit them to Home Office Snapshots to see what other people think.